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France's national data-protection commission confirmed to
CNET that the cars collected the locations
and unique network-hardware IDs of millions of laptops, cell
phones and other Wi-Fi devices such as iPhones, iPads and
Android smartphones.

Google then put this information online so that anyone could find
it. (It's recently taken it offline.)

The Street View cars were meant to harvest only the locations and
unique hardware IDs — called MAC addresses — of Wi-Fi access
points, so that non-GPS-enabled devices could approximate their
locations on Google Maps by seeing what Wi-Fi access points were
nearby.

But the software that recorded the location of each Wi-Fi access
point also recorded the Wi-Fi MAC address of every smartphone,
tablet or laptop connected to that access point.

Whether by accident or by design, Google didn't separate the two
categories. Instead, all the findings went into the same publicly
accessible database.

That means that if you regularly use the Wi-Fi hotspot at the
South Succotash Starbucks, where you meet your secret lover, your
jealous spouse could look up your smartphone's Wi-Fi MAC address
and see that you'd been there.